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Spain’s El Gordo lottery brings respite from political worries

This year, the Golden Witch office has sold about $54 million worth of tickets for two lottery draws – one on Tuesday and a smaller one on January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany – which most Spaniards consider an integral part of their end-of-year festivities.

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Other lotteries have larger individual top prizes but El Gordo is ranked as the world’s richest for the total sum paid out in thousands of prizes.


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The local syndicate will share out four million euros between them.


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Second-prize winners included ticket-holders in Seville and Granada. Buyers can only pick from the numbers their vendor has available.

People across Spain are tuning into radios and television to see if they are among the lucky ones to win a share of 2.2 billion euros ($2.4 billion) in prize money in this year’s Christmas lottery, known as El Gordo (The Fat One). Times have been hard in all of Spain recently, but they’ve been especially hard in Roquetas de Mar, a beach town of about 85,000 people, some 358 miles south of Madrid, on the Mediterranean Sea.

Town comes with an unemployment rate of over 30% – higher in relation to the national average of 21% – and agriculture and tourism are the primary sectors.

“I’m really happy and I congratulate all the winners”, Mayor Gabriel Amat told the Voz de Almeria newspaper. The tickets are sold in many different lottery sites around the country but this year the winning tickets were sold entirely by one lottery agent in the city of 90,000. “It’s very important for the town, especially in the hard times we’ve been facing”.

Drawing for the lottery holds at the Royal Opera House in Madrid.

But Spaniards all over the nation shared in the wealth because their lottery system doles out prizes much more broadly than lotteries with huge jackpots for just a few winners.

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It is also one of the oldest lotteries in the world: the Spanish Christmas lottery began in 1812 and was held for charity.

Winners hold a lottery ticket showing the first prize winning number 79140 of Spain's Christmas Lottery'El Gordo  as they celebrate in Villanueva de la Concepcion near Malaga Spain